• by David Goetzl , May 2, 2013

Donald Parsons, who heads global email for Amazon, says in his keynote address at the Email Insider Summit tabbed "Having A Party With A Million Of Your Closest Personal Friends" that "email is a conversation." It's a "trope," sure, but important to keep in mind.

Amazon thinks about a concept of "tolerance" with email. Subject lines and other content needs to hit the spot in order to please consumers, but a fruitful relationship built over time will bring some forgiveness.

Parsons cites the example of going to a coffee shop daily where the barrister knows his order and he likes it. But if she suggests he try something else, he's tolerant because of their relationship.

Amazon is hyper-sensitive not just to using email for a hard sell, but using history and context with customers to seed a conversation. History with customers can allow marketers to pull out things to make an email "more relevant and well-received."

Amazon has found there are many types of conversations, however. So, what about relevancy at scale?

It's tough to maintain the focus on context. History is difficult as well.

"Scale rocks," though, Parsons says. It brings huge selling opportunity as well as data challenges, but data mining is fun.

Challenges with scale include cost of storage, complexity of data storage, rapid growth of processing and "you need spcialists."